With the Amazon Fire suddenly burning at the front of bargain-conscious consumers’ minds, other cheap tablet news has been coming out of the woodwork. Let’s look at some of it. Not sure how I missed noticing this. In a desperate effort to stem the tide of its stock slumping yesterday, Barnes & Noble knocked $25 off the price of its Nook Color tablet in an e-mail promotion immediately after the Amazon presentation, along with offering free shipping. It seems to be at full price on the website, however. But I’d expect the price to dip for everyone when the...

The Financial Times seems to think the time is now for its employees to be using tablets. PaidContent reports that the company is offering a £300 or $480 rebate to its 1,800 staff against purchase of an iPad or other tablet. Employees who already have a tablet will also receive the rebate. The Dell Inspiron Duo, that 10.1” netbook that has a revolving screen for use as a tablet, will be available for pre-order soon and start shipping in December. The base model will start at $549 (£449). Engadget has a brief review of the specs and a short...

ZDNet reports that Dell is positioning its new 5” Android-powered Streak device as part of its line of healthcare IT products. Too big to be a smartphone, too small to call a tablet, the Streak nonetheless fits perfectly in a lab coat pocket. Dell promises it will “integrate seamlessly” with its other healthcare products, and has a number of useful features that will make it a handy medical data companion. Doctors have very particular information-technology needs, complicated by HIPAA laws that are very specific about what can be done with patient information. Given that Dell already has a...

Even though iPads and other tablets have largely usurped the limelight, netbooks are not going gently into that good night. And with good reason. The netbook is still a perfectly functional form factor for when you need a miniature alternative to a laptop, and could be great for e-reading if you’re willing to overlook the awkwardness of the mini-laptop form factor (or simply turn it on its side to use it like a tablet with a large sideways keyboard hanging off of it). Here are a few interesting netbook-related stories that have surfaced recently. Augen, More Often ...

A Forrester Research survey of about 4,000 consumers reports that 14% plan to buy a tablet computer within the next twelve months—ahead of the 13% who plan to buy a laptop or 11% to buy an e-book reader, PC World reports. Forrester thinks that this is encouraging news not just for Apple, but for its competitors in the tablet form factor as well. (Found via Gadgetell.) But that tablet probably won’t be a Dell Streak. The LA News Monitor notes that reviews of the $300 cell contract-bound 5” tablet are largely negative. Even though the device is “also...

Following up to my post about Augen devices last night, I just called the Kmart in Branson and spoke to them, and what they had in stock was the e-book reader, and one remaining unit of an Augen netbook different from the one Engadget found. Engadget’s find was an Android “smartbook” with a 400 MHz processor and 128 megabytes of RAM, but Branson has one clearanced unit of what appears to be this model listed for $75 (currently out of stock) on Geeks.com, or $67.99 + $9.99 shipping at NewEgg (apparently in stock), a Windows CE “smartbook” with...

CrunchGear has a quick look at the 5-inch Dell Streak. They say that it's not an iPad that but that it is a "worthy entrant". According to them: The device has a 5-megapixel camera, touchscreen, and built-in GPS. You can use it to watch movies and listen to music and it has a fully-featured webkit browser running on a 1GHz Snapdragon processor, making it quite speedy. The device features a built-in GSM modem so you can connect to 3G networks and make calls, making the Streak look like a comically big EVO 4G, except without the 4G. It really looks to...